Real Estate and Instagram

Do real estate agents get good marketing returns (listings and sales) from Instagram?

Great question – and one worth answering before you decide to go all in on social media marketing.

You first have to find out

• is your target audience on Instagram?
• Do they think about real estate while using the platform?
• Will they interact and follow you?

I’m dubious about Instagram as a way to sell real estate or get listing instructions.

Second stage research

Find out if other real estate agents are just growing a following or are actually getting listings from their social media.

Below are articles about how to get followers…. but before you invest a lot of time and effort into this work, figure out whether people who will hire you to sell their homes are using Instagram as a way to find a real estate agent. Do this by asking the people who DON’T list with you, do this by asking your friends and neighbours, do this by asking other agents in your business and competitors. Form a rounded view from all their information. Remember some will lie to you or exaggerate. Who you pick in your sample will affect the answers – if you only speak to cynics you’ll get answers slanted towards the negative.

And it could be that your type of clients are very different from other agents’ clients – this could be geography or age or ethnicity driven.  So assess your answers carefully.

Get social media followers

Here’s how to get followers on Instagram for yourself by copying successful practitioners

• Search instagram for NZ real estate agents
• Follow them and read all their posts
• Also check out their other social media sites (FB/LI/Snapchat (unlikely)/TikTok/Twitter)
• Work out which ones are getting likes, comments, follows, shares
• Work out what TYPE of posts are getting the most likes, comments and shares
• Adapt and copy what they do for your own account
• See if you gain followers

Above all, beware of buying followers. Just don’t do it.

But you should consider buying social sharing software e.g. Buffer or Hootsuite because they can save you a lot of time especially with scheduling posts (which isn’t allowed on the native Instagram site).

Learn how to do Instagram right

For these links. Read them. Then subscribe to their newsletter, follow them on social (Neil Patel has a great youtube channel too).

• Every week make sure you read what they send you. Action what you can on your account,
• Check whether the tactics they mention are working (or not).
• Adapt / adjust your daily Instagram practice based on your observations.
• https://blog.hootsuite.com/how-to-get-more-instagram-followers-the-ultimate-guide/
• https://sproutsocial.com/insights/how-to-get-followers-on-instagram/
• https://neilpatel.com/blog/how-to-get-300-real-targeted-instagram-followers-per-day/
• https://later.com/blog/get-instagram-followers/
• https://adespresso.com/blog/instagram-for-real-estates/

And you should research AdFenix – they specialise in guiding your marketing practice for real estate professionals.
Expensive but probably worthwhile. They are a whole-marketing service not just social media.

Now it’s down to persistence and regular hard work. Give yourself 3 months before you decide to quit.